Farmhouse Renovation
ladygibbs
7 years ago
last modified: 7 years ago
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One Devoted Dame
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Subfloor as Final Flooring? Feedback Requested
Comments (31)The OP is aware that they are subfloors hence the original question. Most houses in certain parts of Texas are built close to the ground on a slab-on-grade with an integral shallow concrete perimeter foundation. This house has a pier & beam foundation where the house is raised above grade on beams supported by concrete or CMU dug piers or driven piles. This foundation system is usually more expensive than a slab but not when the soil is expansive clay, a common condition in Texas. In the 80's developers liked to use carpet and resilient flooring instead of hardwood finish flooring and these finishes required a subfloor and a layer of underlayment. Apparently that was the case in this house and the developer chose to use nominal 2x6 T&G decking instead of two thinner layers or a single 1 1/4" thick layer of plywood which might have also made it possible to use 24" o.c. or wider joist spacing. What we haven't been told is the elevation difference between the decking and any finished hardwood flooring in the house especially at the stairs. It might not even be possible to install finished wood flooring over the decking and still be able to align it with with other finish flooring in the house. Regardless of the appearance of the finished decking, it is important to avoid large transition strips where different materials meet. This post was edited by Renovator8 on Sun, Mar 23, 14 at 13:00...See MoreConnecticut Shoreline Farmhouse Renovation
Comments (0)I have enjoyed reading so many posts on these forums over the years and finally decided to post our own project for everyone. I know this is more of a question and answer forum but I have received many answers to questions here over the years and I thought our project could do the same for others. My wife and I are currently renovating an old farmhouse on the Connecticut shore that was in desperate need of some major TLC. We purchased the home in January 2015 and will be living here full time once the renovations are complete. Before I begin to post our upcoming progress updates on this forum I want to mention that I am a professional builder. This scale of reconstruction is not for the faint of heart. The Basement: Our home had been converted into a two family rental many years ago by the previous owners which meant that we needed to reconfigure the entire home to function as an updated single family residence. Old furnaces, water heaters, broken plumbing, and damaged duct work littered the basement. The tangled mess of wiring and temporary support columns was overwhelming. Every piece of old mechanical, electrical, and plumbing was removed to the scrap yard of deposited in the dumpster. Demolition began in the basement because I didn't feel safe moving demolition activities upstairs until the house had better support in the basement level. Our existing basement floors were a mix of dirt, concrete, and stone rubble with a total ceiling height of approximately 6 feet. We chose to dig up and lower the existing dirt floor by almost 2 feet to increase headroom in the space. Over the coarse of 8 days, five of us worked tirelessly shoveling, prying, and carrying 5 gallon buckets of material out of the basement. Lots of care was taken to temporarily support floor loads above while we worked our way around the basement. Eventually all that remained was an enormous pile of debris outside and a mine field of large round boulders in the basement floor that were too large to move and were taller than the future finished concrete floor height would allow. Lowering a dirt floor below the bottom of the existing foundation is risky business. We wanted the extra headroom and knew we would never get another chance to create more ceiling height if we didn't do it all at once. We had to be careful not to undermine the foundation and risk a collapse. In the old days, rubble foundations were not poured on concrete footings. They started by laying large stones at the base and eventually used smaller stones until they reached the desired top of basement wall height. To minimize the danger and risk a wall collapse after we lowered the floor, I poured a small steel reinforced curb wall in sections around the perimeter of the basement to hold back all of the exposed soil below the foundation stones....See MoreNew England Contemporary Farm House Kitchen Renovation Progress Thread
Comments (48)My sister put in a lux vinyl. It looks like stone yet has that bit of give that a wood floor system provides. You can't tell from looking if it is stone or porcelain? I've heard that ceramic or stone can be hard on the back or legs when standing in the kitchen....See More1908 Farm House Attic Renovation
Comments (7)Hire an architect. And think of which room you want to give up downstairs for the stairs. And measure the clear space from the joists to the peak. If you don’t have around 102”, you wont have room for the internal framing and insulation overhead. You would need to tear off the roof and raise it. You might as well move as do that. Everyhing you touch has to meet today’s Modern building codes. From a big enough electrical panel to pr ovide thecright nunber if AFI circuits, to the HVAC requirements, to the rise and run of the stairs. If it wasn’t designed to be living space from the beginning, it won’t ever be cheap to make into living space now....See MoreOne Devoted Dame
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5 years agoMark Bischak, Architect
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